


tell me (if you like the way it feels)

by dirty_diana



Category: Gossip Girl
Genre: Childhood Friends, Consensual Underage Sex, Friends With Benefits, M/M, Pining, Pre-Canon, Underage Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-25
Updated: 2011-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 03:17:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15787845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirty_diana/pseuds/dirty_diana
Summary: Chuck and Nate and the year before everything changes.





	tell me (if you like the way it feels)

**Author's Note:**

> contains teenagers (14/15+) having sex, sometimes while under the influence. beta'd by the awesome inalasahl.

Sophomore year is the year that Serena van der Woodsen disappears upstate, vanished from the city and the Gossip Girl homepage. It's the same year that Blair Waldorf spends vomiting in restrooms and thinking no one knows.

Chuck is fifteen and a half. It's been six years since he discovered single malt Scotch whiskey, three since he and Georgina Sparks had a messy, clueless encounter in a closet at a classmate's birthday party. About the same number since he lit his first joint, and now Chuck is in high school and he's discovered a new addiction. Something he does because he shouldn't, just as much as for any other reason.

Nate is one of only two tenth-graders on the varsity lacrosse team. Chuck isn't good at team activities of any kind, but he tucks his favourite flask inside his jacket, and attends every home game.

On the weekends, Nate goes to team parties and takes Chuck along with him. Chuck isn't unaware. If he wasn't friends with Nate Archibald he wouldn't get invited anywhere, but he's learned not to care about that. Later he'll learn not to care if he's been invited at all, but this is before Blair dances on the stage at Victrola, and confuses everything. Nate and Chuck still go everywhere together.

*

Alex Noble is captain of the lacrosse team, and he catches Chuck's attention from the field. Chuck gives his first blowjob in the master bath of Alex parents' condo, kneeling on the hard Italian marble tiles. Alex gasps urgent groans and presses his fingers into Chuck's neck, violent marks that turn purple the next day and seem to mean that Chuck is doing something right. When he comes it's messy, over Chuck's mouth and on his chin. Then Alex watches, with crass, whispered comments, as Chuck pushes a hand into his pants and touches himself.

It's the best fucking thing that Chuck has done in a long time. Later, the goalkeeper for the Lycée Français teaches him how to do it wetter, deeper, all the things that Chuck loves. Later he gives up on high school boys altogether.

Chuck hasn't given up on girls yet. Not entirely. The girls at Constance Billiard don't give him the time of day, but Chuck goes to parties and puts his hand up the skirt of shy, clinging ninth-graders from Sacred Heart Academy. At the same events he gets stoned with Nate, and studies his friend long enough to notice that Nathaniel Archibald is passing into adulthood the most gracefully of them all.

*

Nate knows. When it's just the two of them Chuck tells stories, spells out every lewd kiss and drunken touch he's been given. After school they hotbox the bathroom of Chuck's suite, and Nate tells him about Blair, who still won't let her boyfriend get past second base. Nate talks about Blair, but his face tells tales of Serena. Nate doesn't think that Chuck has any clue. So Chuck doesn't say anything.

Maybe it's the sound of Blair's name, or memories of Serena. Maybe it's the weed, or the warmth of close quarters, or Chuck's stories of Upper West Side girls who trade blow jobs for top shelf tequila stolen from the Bass Tower kitchens.

The first time it happens, Chuck pretends not to notice. It's enough to lean back against the cool, smooth mirror and watch his friend's dick pressing its rigid shape against the front of Nate's pants. The next time, he closes his eyes and thinks that Blair Waldorf is an idiot.

Later Chuck jerks off in his bed, just before he falls asleep.

Maybe he hopes that Nate will catch him looking.

*

One night they swap the weed for Scotch, and Chuck loses any sense of caution that he should have.

"Do you want a hand job?"

Nate's sleepy eyes fly wide open, uncertain. "Seriously?"

Chuck can't help an easy, wicked smile. "Seriously, Nathaniel. Just because your girlfriend is a nun doesn't mean you have to suffer."

"I can't." Nate flinches at the mention of Blair. "She would..."

"Never know," Chuck finishes, already bored of talking about it.

Nate hesitates. He's closer to sober then Chuck is, and one hand rests in his lap, covertly stroking. He asks, "Would you want to?"

And that's all the invitation Chuck needs to move closer. He presses his hand to Nate's groin and murmurs, "It's not a big deal. Everyone does it." When Nate is relaxed enough Chuck shoves down Nate's zipper without ceremony, reaching into Nate's shorts and stroking the swollen, shiny head of Nate's penis. Chuck keeps talking, under hushed breath. "Just close your eyes. Think of her."

Nate complies, with a low, barely audible whimper.

Chuck never finds out if "her" is Blair or Serena, or some sex-soaked combination.

*

The first time Nate sighs quietly under Chuck's even strokes. Then jerks his hips up, in a motion that's dirtier than any movie Chuck's ever seen, and shoots come over Chuck's hand, onto his fingers and wrist.

Then he opens his eyes, says "thank you," with perfect Archibald politeness. Nate's embarrassment shows all over his face despite himself, so Chuck doesn't say anything except "you're welcome".

In Chuck's experience, first times usually aren't worth remembering. Nate will be an exception. Chuck hangs on to the image of his best friend, slouched against the wall of Chuck's suite, whispering, "Fuck, fuck, fuck," between hard, quick breaths that weren't quite moans.

*

By the fourth time, Nate doesn't even close his eyes.

*

The fifth time, Nate watches him, watches every move that Chuck makes. Inevitably his gaze drifts to the uneven pace of Chuck's breathing, and the slight bulge between his thighs, under his school uniform. Nate's eyes widen.

He speaks very carefully afterward, watching Chuck wipe his hands on a white hotel towel. He hesitates at first, and then Nate seems to make a decision. "Do you, um. Do you want me to do something?"

It's not an offer that Chuck ever expected to get.

That's the day that Chuck teaches Nate how to touch him. Nate doesn't flinch from the heat of Chuck's dick, or the filthy, precise words that Chuck uses to describe what he wants.

"Fuck, like that. Don't fucking stop."

Nate's palm is hot, slick with the lube that Chuck pulled out of the bedside drawer. He strokes lightly at first, until Chuck promises, with a small grin, that he won't break. Nate's perfect mouth forms a thin, determined line, until he watches Chuck lick his lips, and come.

*

Nate and Blair are still boyfriend and girlfriend. Still the perfect picture that every girl at Constance Billiard dreams of fitting into, and Blair still sketches out prom dresses and wedding dresses on the pages of her notebooks.

Blair still won't let Nate unhook her bra.

It's a trap Chuck can't imagine being caught in. Chuck still goes to parties on the weekends, then after-parties, and chases girls who make an amused face at the sound of his name.

Chuck Bass.

*

In the first grade seats were arranged alphabetically, by last name, and Charles and Nathaniel sat beside each other and flashed each other secret signs under the desks. Chuck still remembers the hesitation in Anne Archibald's smile the first time that Nate brought his new best friend home. Sometimes Chuck imagines the look on Mrs. Archibald's face if she ever found out that a boy whose parents came from the wrong borough has turned her son a little bit gay.

The thought is sweet enough to be a revenge of its own.

*

Chuck hates Christmas as much as he hates Thanksgiving, as much as he hates his lonely spring birthday. This year as always he waits out the day, fortifying himself for a silent dinner with his father by downing most of a bottle of whiskey. On the twenty-sixth day of December, Chuck and Nate fly to Monaco.

In Monaco Chuck gets fucked for the first time by an Italian nineteen-year-old baccarat dealer, who has bright eyes and a patient smile that remind Chuck of someone else more than he'd like. When Chuck shows up to the suite forty-eight hours later, stinking of booze and missing his tie, Nate doesn't say anything. He never does.

*

Nate's eyes widen in disbelief when he hears the tale. "You let him put his dick inside your...and you liked that?"

"Without question," Chuck answers. It hadn't been perfect, but it was definitely worth doing again. Then he grins. "Don't worry, Nathaniel. Queen Blair will let you put her dick in her one day."

Nate makes a face. Like he doesn't believe it, or maybe like it doesn't matter.

*

Chuck knows that Nate wants more from this life than he should. And he knows that in the end Nate won't get to choose. One of the perks of being Bart Bass' son, of having brand new money and no family name to speak of, was having no expectations to weigh on his shoulders. None save the ones Bart pretended to have for him, the ones that were just an excuse to tell Chuck what a disappointment he was and always would be.

Nate is a Vanderbilt. Nate has a wife and a career already picked out for him, and everyone knows what happens next. Eventually Nate will put a ring on Blair's finger, and Blair will finally spread her legs for him, all exactly as scheduled.

Chuck only fits into that as a sidekick, as the coarse best friend people tolerate because Nate asks them to.

*

"Do you want to kiss me?"

On the surface it's a stupid question, delivered earnestly while Chuck thumbs down the zipper on Nate's school-regulation grey wool slacks. Chuck looks up, and Nate shrugs at Chuck's expression. "Girls usually want to. We don't have to."

Chuck opens his mouth to say no, and in that moment feels it more than ever. Want. For fucking clueless, romantic Nathaniel, for whom everything comes easy and nothing can ever be enough.

"Let's try it, then," Chuck agrees. They kiss, and it's sticky and awkward and Chuck rubs his palm against the length of Nate's hard dick and doesn't want to stop.

Maybe Nate's over-eager heart is contagious.

*

Like the rest of the Upper East Side, Chuck deals in illusions, but he doesn't buy into them if he can help it. Chuck doesn't know if Nate really believes that every other pair of best friends hooks up after school, before homework.

Nate wears the heart pin that Blair gave him on the inside of his sleeve, a perfectly overdone Blair Waldorf metaphor. In a warm, smoky bathroom, Nate kisses Chuck as if he really means it. Nate has always believed what he wants to.

*

It shouldn't be enough, but it is.

*fin.


End file.
